


Twinge

by RantCasey



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Slow Burn, Will update with tags as the story progresses, all sorts of nasty shit, eventual m!ss maccready, eventual m!ss/hancock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-23 19:38:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6127895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RantCasey/pseuds/RantCasey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The adventures of Rocco, a male sole survivor with a maxed out strength tree and not much else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He sat bolt upright, his breath catching in his throat. The shell of a house was dark, and moonlight crept through the windows. On the other side of the room, Hancock sat in a rickety wooden chair. He'd taken Jet recently. It showed around his eyes. 

He wiped his forehead and leaned over to grab some purified water from his pack. He'd fallen asleep with the Pipboy on again. 

Hancock knew to be quiet. The first few times this had happened, in the dawn of their companionship, Hancock had quipped, made some kinda joke that rubbed Rocco the wrong way, and things had gotten tense. Now, he knew. Just like he knew not to ask when Rocco stopped and stared for minutes at a time. 

If they both stayed away from certain topics, then sometimes, things could be pretty okay. 

His hands were filthy. Almost always were, these days. His fingernails were chipped and dark with dirt. A shake was developing in his hands. Did Hancock notice? Would he say anything if he did? Rocco pressed his palms over his eyes. Outside, there was the sound of gunfire in the distance. 

"How's it going?" Hancock had waited just long enough so that it seemed casual. The gesture was lost on Rocco, who removed his palms from his face and exhaled. 

"Howd'ya think?" 

They settled into an uneasy silence. Hancock took out his knife and started to carve something on the arm of the chair. 

Before, in his old life, the dreams had always been about the war. He'd sit up quick or scream and Nora would look at him with that face that meant she was feeling sorry for him. Like pity, but only a little better. They'd met before he'd gone off. When he came back, emptied out, his face criss crossed with scars, she'd stayed. Sometimes, he'd gotten the idea that she didn't really want to, didn't really want to hold together a life with a walking horror show. But Shaun was already making her belly swollen and fat, making her boobs firm and heavy. 

Shaun. Thinking about the kid too long made his insides feel sour in the worst way. 

He'd been staring off into space again. When he looked around the room, Hancock was looking away like he didn't want to meet his eyes. 

"Got any buffout?" 

"Lemme see what I got." He didn't put down the knife until he finished carving another line into the arm of the chair. 

Hancock produced the buffout and tossed it to Rocco, who was pulling on a shirt. It landed in his lap. The brown mattress had put a crink in his back. He straightened up and leaned back until there was a soft pop. 

His chem of choice was typically Psycho, but these days, he was more or less dependent on all of them. Mentats, Jet, Buffout, hell, if he didn't get a few drinks in him the shaking would get worse. They were constantly stopping in Goodneighbor to visit Fred. Raiding medical boxes became a priority. Hancock needed them too, the chems. Maybe not as bad. He needed Mentats and Jet, but wasn't opposed to the other ones, as far as Rocco could see.

Some days, if they hadn't been able to find anything in a while and were a long ways away from Goodneighbor or even Diamond City, they both walked through the wasteland sick. Rocco sweating bullets and holding his gun so tight his knuckles turned white so the shaking stopped, Hancock wobbling on his feet not too far behind. 

He swallowed the Buffout and looked over at his companion out of the corner of his eye. 

The Buffout coursed through his body, his muscles burned and flexed, the feeling was sort of like after he was done working out and the blood all ran into his muscles. Toward the end of his old life, he'd gotten big, bigger than he was now, a little less fat from eating shitty food all the time, to compensate for his face. To try and make Nora look at him with any look but the one where her eyes frowned but she tried to keep her mouth from frowning too. 

"Let's get outta here." He was full of energy now, the dream seeping back into his brain and out of his memory. His heart was hammering. 

"Where to?" Whatever Hancock was carving, he'd either gotten bored with it or was done now. The knife was away. 

Where to? Rocco furrowed his brow. Good question. 

There was still shit to do with the Brotherhood of Steel, finding artifacts and doing some "cleansing", but those folks talking down about Hancock (never directly to him, Rocco had noticed) was starting to wear down on his nerves. They were outside of Lexington. 

"Goodneighbor? Wanna drop off some stuff, pick up some stuff." 

The implication wasn't lost on Hancock, who nodded. 

Rocco stood and started pulling on his armor. With the sunglasses on, his face, it looked a little better. People couldn't see the permenant dark circles under his eyes. The way four or five of the scars all converged to create an ugly mass of red. 

Hancock had never asked. 

Most people didn't. He tried to discourage that kind of talk. Mostly by deflecting, being rude, ending conversations and offending people as quickly as possible before they realized that not only was his face a mess, but he was dumb too. 

That was another thing that he wasn't sure Hancock noticed. Him being dumb. It was like some dark hidden secret. Something to be kept squirreled away and protected. That was one thing about the scars, they distracted people. Plenty of things could make people not ask questions. He'd gotten sort of good at it, in his new life. Responding to things by taking Psycho, swearing at strangers, once even producing his knife and slamming it into the bar he was sitting at hard enough that the tip dissappeared an inch into the old wood. Vaim had looked at him with his face an o of genuine surprise and a solid amount of fear.

He never had to do any of that to get Hancock not to ask. 

If they both avoided talking about how messed up they were, when they were alone, it was like they were both normal. Almost. 

Rocco tugged his beret over his blonde hair and picked up his assault rifle. 

"Goodneighbor then." Hancock repeated, rising from the chair. The moon was high in the sky. His Pipboy said it was two thirty in the morning. 

It'd be a long journey there. The Buffout was still ripping through him, making the familiar warm feeling in his gut that seemed to spread and spread until it all went away at once. Something in side him twinged, craving Psycho. The Buffout would have to do for now. 

"We can just go around Lexington, place is fucking empty." They'd just been here less than a week ago and had searched it top to bottom for chems, all while under gunfire. 

Hancock asked something but Rocco didn't catch it. The ring in his ears was more or less permenant. Some days were better than others. 

"Huh?" 

"I asked if you had any Radaway. Bet we're gonna run into some ferals." 

"Pretty sure. Don't feel like looking." Rocco opened the door and stepped into the moonlight. 

 

Sometimes, he thought about what Shaun would think about him. If maybe, when (not if, never if) he found his son, Shaun would take one look at Rocco and not want him for a father. He'd have to kick the chems. Addictol would work fine, but that wasn't really the problem. The real problem couldn't be fixed, maybe.

They walked through the wasteland. Rocco lit a cigarette. Behind him, there was the familiar sound of a Jet inhaler. 

Hancock laughed, his voice thick and jerky. 

In the distance, more gunfire. His heartbeat picked up right away. His finger rested on the trigger. 

His pants were going shiny at the knees. He needed to wash. Shave a little. Maybe get a haircut, if he had the caps for it. He probably smelled. 

Hancock was back from the short Jet trip, still smiling. 

"Go well?" The silence had started to fill him up with bad thoughts. That was why he didn't travel with the dog. 

"You know it, Rock." 

They detoured around Lexington and started in the approximate location of Goodneighbor. 

"Gonna be walking a while." 

"Yeah." He didn't know what to do but agree. 

The twinges inside him were growing. The Buffout was wearing off. The feeling of the strength leaving his body was like being deflated. 

"Hey, Hancock." 

"Yeah?" 

"Got any Mentats?" Rocco tried to eep his voice even like he didn't really, really need some Mentats. 

Hancock paused. Probably trying to figure out what he had left and if he could afford to share without getting his own inside twinges. 

"Got a couple," he said after a while. 

Relief flooded through Rocco. 

The Mentats made Hancock talkative and focussed. A few of those things and he'd start drawing up strategies and making all sorts of plans that were forgotten when the high wore off. Rocco, when he took them, he could read a little better. Sometimes. Still, if they came across a note or a map or a terminal, it was always Hancock to deal with that sort of thing. Rocco's job was punching things until they died. They'd both fallen into their respective roles pretty quick after deciding to travel together. 

There were other things Hancock didn't ask about. And Rocco, he couldn't ask. Not with the wrong words, and he couldn't get the right ones in his head, so he didn't. 

Sometimes, it was like there was something there, and then suddenly, it'd go away all at once and he didn't know if it was real or not. 

When he felt it, sometimes, he'd start working up the courage to ask, trying to put words in the right order, and Hancock would just fix this stare on him, his black eyes burning right through Rocco, and he'd stop. 

They had a good thing going. Fucking it up for that would be a mistake. 

The Mentats were working his brain, jump starting his heart, refining his vision. The tremors in his hands got worse. Fuck. He'd forgotten about that part. He took his hands off his assault rifle, letting it slap against his front on its strap, and jammed them into his pockets. If he looked at Hancock to see if he'd noticed too soon, he'd give himself away, so he just walked straight ahead. 

"You doing something in there?" 

The question almost shocked him until he realized it was some sort of dirty pocket joke. 

He never was much of a laugher. 

"No." He curled his hands into fists. 

"Looks like we gotta make a pit stop." He'd said it to mildly that the meaning was lost on Rocco for a moment. When the understanding bloomed in his mind, he nodded. 

"Yeah." 

Hancock's hands never shook. Then again, Hancock didn't have all his skin, so maybe it was a different set of rules for him. 

"Hey big guy, looks like we got some buildings up ahead." 

Rocco squinted a the horizon. 

Most of the Commonwealth was at least familiar to him at this point. 

"Looks like that factory." He pulled his hands out of his pockets, forgetting about the shaking, to look through the scope mounted on his assault rifle. 

"Corvega Assembly." Hancock was always good for that kinda stuff. 

"Can't get a good look at it." He put the assault rifle down. Beads of sweat were beginning to form on his forehead. 

"Think there's more raiders?" 

Rocco paused. 

"Probably." 

Hancock nodded and flicked his eyes down at Rocco's hands. 

They continued walking. 

Rocco heard Hancock popping a few mentats. Something inside him coiled with jealousy. Or maybe it was just the nausea setting in. His mouth had gone dry and sticky. Inside his clothes and armor, he was boiling. He half expected for Hancock to offer him something, but the offer never came. 

"Could go for a beer." It was meant to sound conversational. Instead, his voice came out sounding raspy and harsh. 

Hancock didn't take the bait. 

They drew closer and crouched behind the remains of a car. This close, they could see around six or seven raiders. Maybe more were sleeping inside. If they used stealth, maybe they could waste everyone outside without alerting people inside. That wouldn't happen. Even if they tried. 

"Been saving this for when we needed it." Hancock was digging in the pocket of his jacket. He produced the familiar syringe. 

Psycho. Rocco's eyes lit up. 

He almost snatched it out of the ghoul's hand. 

"Fucking kill!" He squeezed the trigger of the assault rifle spraying bullets and revealing their location as the raiders began to fire. When the gun was out of ammo, he threw it on the ground and took out his knife. He sprinted, weaving through the gunfire almost without meaning to. The closest raider got a knife right in the neck, blood spattered across Rocco's face. Somewhere, far in the back of his mind, he realized that he was wearing sunglasses at night. A bullet lodged in his thigh and he spun the knife in his hand so the blade pointed down and jammed it in the hole and twisted it until a piece of bullet fell onto the steel stairs with a clunk. 

A raider fell dead before Rocco could approach with his knife. From above, they were still firing. 

"Fuck!" Rocco kicked open the door, which slapped the inside wall, and took out his pistol. The first raider to approach him came with a tire iron and he shot her in the knee and stabbed her in the face. The second and third fired from a platform above. His thigh was bleeding now but he didn't notice the pain or the face that blood was soaking into his sock. He shot one raider in the chest, and the raider reared back, finger still on the trigger of his automatic 10mm, spraying bullets around the factory until Rocco finished the job. 

The other raider had moved back to avoid his comrade's fire, but fell dead before Rocco could approach with the knife. He looked behind him. Hancock waved from another platform. 

Why were they here again? 

There was a blank in his mind that went on for a long time. 

Chems. They were here for chems. 

The Psycho was starting to wear off. The main room of the factory had been cleared. 

"Gotta find a chem stash." He hadn't noticed how out of breath he was until he tried to speak. Hancock nodded and said something that Rocco didn't hear. He didn't ask for clarification. Maybe it wasn't important. 

"What gives? Gonna answer me, Rocky?" 

Rocco turned to look at Hancock who was studying him with narrowed eyes. It had taken Rocco a while to get into the groove of understanding Hancock's expressions. This one, though, was new. What did it mean? Fuck if he knew. 

"Didn't hear you." 

The moment that passed between them was thick with something like tension. 

Finally, Hancock shrugged. 

"Not important. Let's find that stash." 

Chem addiction was one thing. Hell, it was plain acceptable in Hancock's eyes. Everything else though? If Hancock caught wind of other things, maybe he'd find someone else to sow his wild oates with. Someone better. Someone who wasn't hollow inside. Emptied out. Among other things.

They came across a few raiders with stun batons. They ran right for them before being shot down. Raiders somehow managed to make Rocco feel smart. 

Rocco shouldered open a locked door instead of bothering to pick it. It gave easily under his weight. 

"Bingo." Hancock said, following Rocco inside the little room. 

Two stimpacks. Rocco used one, and the wound in his leg knit itself back together. It didn't do much for his bloody sock. Two Jet inhalers, a syringe of psycho, and mentats. 

"We split everything, you take the psycho, I'll take the mentats." 

"I need the mentats." Maybe he spoke a little too quickly or a little too harshly. Hancock pulled another face Rocco couldn't recognize or interpret. 

"We'll be in Goodneighbor in a couple hours. Don't want us both to be strung out. I'll take the mentats." 

Sudden rage boiled up from his stomach and Rocco balled one hand into a fist and for one second was almost going to wind up and sock Hancock in the face but instead he marched out of the room and wound up and punched the concrete wall. His hand immediately began to swell and bruise. Something had given inside. One knuckle had flattened out. 

He bit the side of his mouth to stifle a scream and it only half worked. 

Hancock looked at him from the doorway. 

Rocco sat down and looked at his hand and took out a stimpack. There was no way in hell he was going to leg it all the way back to Goodneighbor with a busted up hand, no matter how he got it. 

He felt Hancock's stare on him long after he'd broken eye contact. 

"What?" Rocco spat. 

Hancock stayed by the door. 

"If we're gonna do this, you're gonna have to start talking to me, Rock. I know you don't like using your words but something's gotta give." Where Rocco had expected anger there was only something like disappointment. Which was dangerously close to pity. Rocco's anger flared. 

"Talk about what?" 

"Talk about the stuff that you think I'm too dense to notice." Irritation had entered his voice. 

Rocco was silent. 

"Don't play dumb. You know what I'm getting at." 

A lump grew in Rocco's throat. He stood. 

"I liked that you didn't ask." 

"I'm asking now. We gotta get on an even keel here." Hancock paused. "Unless you don't think I deserve to know after all this time." 

He stared at his boots and opened and closed his healed hand. How was he supposed to respond to that?

"Don't shut me out." A note of desperation? 

And then the feeling came back again, except now, he definitely didn't have the words to address it. Rocco swallowed. 

"Why do you want me to tell you things you already know?" He hadn't stopped looking at his boots. There were still flecks of blood on his sunglasses. 

Hancock's gaze was practically burning a hole into the side of his face. 

"Fine. Let's get the fuck outta here then, we got what we needed." He turned and started walking out of the factory, stepping over a dead raider on his way though the hallway. 

After about a minute, Rocco followed. 

 

The eastern side of the sky was beginning to lighten. In an hour or so, dawn would break. Hancock was leading the way back to Goodneighbor now. Rocco trailed behind twenty feet or so. 

How could he explain everything to Hancock? Was there really anything left to explain? Things had gotten tense before, but this was closer to a genuine fight than Rocco was comfortable with. And with the other feelings mixed up in it too, it was just further complicated. 

Bloatflies buzzed in a group in the distance, far enough away that it would be a waste of ammo to deal with them. A sliver of the sun appeared over the horizon. He wiped the blood off of his sunglasses with his sleeve, then removed them to fog the lenses and wipe off the smudge that his sleeve had left. 

Maybe if he had some mentats on him, he could take like eight and then be smart enough to fix whatever the hell was going on between him and Hancock. Or have a heart attack. 

His pack was getting dangerously heavy. He'd gotten three cartons of cigarettes from the factory (the name had already slipped his mind again) and that was somehow the final straw. He dropped his pack and put both fists on the small of his back and arched backward. There ws an audible pop and he sighed. 

Hancock was walking back toward him. 

"I can take somma that off your hands." He said it casually. Relief washed over Rocco. Maybe they could just pretend none of what had just transpired had actually happened. 

Rocco nodded his thanks and gave some of his junk to Hancock. 

"This stuff actually worth anything?" 

Was it? Sort of. In a different way. In the kind of way that whenever he got Shaun back, they could live in some kinda nice furnished house like he had before the bombs fell, with those small personal touches like knick knacks and comic books and clothes, and maybe if Shaun saw all that he wouldn't have to be ashamed. 

"I think so." 

Hancock accepted the answer and they continued walking. 

Something was starting to eat at him again, and it wasn't hunger. The chems didn't do much for is appetite. Half the time, Hancock reminded him to eat something. It was something that somehow crossed craving with ugly sickness. Rocco couldn't put his finger on what exactly he was needing. Could be booze. Buffout? No, no he'd had a dose of that. Jet? Maybe. Was worth a try. 

He inhaled the shitty fumes and suddenly everything was slow, whatever he was saying was stretched out, looking around it was like his eyesight was on a delay. 

It wore off before he could take ten steps and he was left with the foggy afterglow. 

"Watch it. Area's not safe for smoothskins." Hancock had drawn his gun. They were passing some hollowed out buildings. "Ferals." He gestured with his shotgun. Sure enough, a feral was rising, and then sprinting. Two more followed it. 

Rocco patted his person, looking for his assault rifle. His eyes widened behind his sunglasses.

"Forgot my fucking gun at the factory." 

"Lay off the chems." Hancock said, putting one in a feral's noggin before it came within six feet of them. Rocco pulled out his knife, held it blade down, and jammed it into the face of the next ghoul to come close. Hancock finished off the last one with a buckshot shampoo.

"That supposed to be a joke?" 

"Lighten up." 

"How the fuck-" Rocco caught himself. He exhaled, took off his sunglasses, and rubbed his eyes. Between the three ghouls the only loot was an 8 ball and five caps. 

Hancock looked at him like he wanted to say something, then turned and continued walking. 

"What about my gun?" 

"I ain't walking back there and neither are you with all that shit you're lugging around." 

Sometimes, it was just easier to let Hancock make decisions. 

 

The sun got higher in the sky and it got warmer. Circles of sweat formed under Rocco's arms. His shirt was sticking to his back and chest. He and Hancock were more or less walking side by side, now. 

"Could use a breather." 

"I feel ya, brother." 

They stopped under the shade of a dead tree. 

"Don't wanna kill the mood, but have you thought about what I said back there?" 

"No." A lie. 

Hancock scratched the back of his head. 

"I ain't gonna skip out on you if you don't say anything. It'd just be easier if I knew what was eatin you. I'm not up for this guessing game bullshit, Rocky." 

"What's eating me is my wife got shot in the head, my son got stolen, and the world is a fucking wasteland." 

"What are you afraid of? I've seen you do every chem under the sun and then some, I been following you around for..." Hancock paused, trying to put together just how long it'd been. "... a while now. And what? You want me to pretend like I don't notice shit?" 

Rocco had no response. 

"Cause if no one else says anything, it's not happening then, right? That right, Rocco? You're the most thickheaded sonnofabitch I've ever met." 

No response to that one either. 

"You gonna clam up on me now?" 

Rocco took some water out of his pack and took a deep drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The tremors were back to being just barely perceptible. 

"If you notice, then why do you stick around?" 

Hancock looked at him for a long time. 

"You really don't get it, huh?" He shook his head and started walking again. 

Rocco stashed his water and followed. What was he supposed to be getting? If Hancock was good at picking up on things he was just the opposite. This tension, this argument that was just rolling and boiling under the surface, it was the last thing they fucking needed. The odds were already stacked up high against them, a man stuck out of time and a ghoul. 

"Hey, Hancock?" 

"Yeah?" His voice was flat. 

"Listen. If you want to know things, you have to ask the questions. I'm not a mindreader." The lump in his throat returned. 

Hancock turned to study his face but didn't stop walking. 

"It's gonna be awkward any way ya cut it. We gotta do this though. Something wrong with your ears?" 

Rocco's heartbeat picked up. 

Nora, she'd noticed it too, after he'd come back. He'd gotten too close to too many explosions, too close to gunfire. She'd say something sometimes and his ears would either be ringing or he plain wouldn't hear it. She'd started throwing things at him to get his attention.

"I was in the Army before the bombs. None of this shit helped either." He gestured vaguely to the wasteland around them. "My ears ring. Mostly all the time. A lot of my hearing got blasted away."

"Figured it was something like that. Woulda liked to know that a while ago, here I thought you were just ignoring me." 

Rocco winced. He hadn't considered that. 

"That why you don't like talking to people?" 

"How'd you know that?" 

That drew a laugh from Hancock. 

"You're a dick to everyone we meet for no reason. Or you pull some weird scary shit so they go away." Hancock shrugged. "Wasn't too hard to put together, compadre." 

Was he really this transparent? 

"It's uh, not that. Doesn't help though. It's more, other stuff." 

Hancock motioned for him to continue. 

"Like my face is fucked and I don't want people asking shit." The other reason would make him sound too insecure, too worried. No reason to overshare. 

"That from the Army too?" 

"Yeah." 

"How?" 

"Got slashed up with a broken bottle." 

Hancock nodded. 

"I don't even remember what I looked like before, anymore," said Rocco. 

"Me either." 

 

It was almost ten by the time they got to Goodneighbor. They made a beeline for the statehouse. Rocco stashed everything that wasn't necessary to have on his person. 

"I don't even have nostrils and I can tell you're gettin funky." 

"Gotta go see Fred first." 

"Least he won't care." 

"Are you coming with me or should I pick something up for you?" 

Hancock reached into his jacket and fished out a fistfull of caps. 

"Take this and get me as much Jet and Mentats as it'll buy." 

"Right." 

He'd taken off his armor for the first time since the previous night. There was still a huge blood stain on his pantleg and blood flecked across every other part of his person. The sunglasses were back on before he was even back outside. He passed several people he recognized on the way to Hotel Rexford. No one greeted him. He tried to discourage that sort of thing.

Fred's face lit up as soon as he saw Rocco approach. 

"How's my favorite customer today?" 

"Cut the shit." 

Fred's smile slid off his face. 

"I wanna thank you again for the HalluciGen canisters. Haven't quite figured it out yet, but I will." 

"I need as much Jet, Psycho, Mentats and Buffout as you have on you right now." 

"You cut right to the chase, I like it." 

Rocco bit back a sneer. 

Before he left the Hotel, he got as much beer as the drinking buddy would dispense to him, which ended up being twelve. He ended up having to take off his shirt to wrap all the beer and chems in. 

When he got back, Hancock was scraping his gun clean. 

"How was Fred?" 

Sometimes Rocco forgot that Hancock actually had a stake in these people. 

"Okay." 

Hancock made a noise that was almost like a snort. 

"Got the chems?" 

"And beer." 

"You walk through town like that?" He nodded to Rocco's bare torso. 

"Yeah." He shrugged. 

"Good. Let em stare." 

Rocco shook his head. Hancock had a weird thing with nudity. He couldn't really figure it out. It was definitely a thing though. The scars on his back and chest didn't compare to what was going on with his face. 

"You look like the poster child for Buffout." 

The confusion must've shown, because Hancock followed up by saying: "It's a compliment." 

He divvied up the chems and beer and ate some Rad-X before washing himself with a bucket of questionable water. When he returned, Hancock was crushing roughly an entire pack of mentats between his molars. Secretly, Rocco liked when Hancock chomped on a bunch of mentats. He got talkative. Smarter, and he was already smart to begin wtih. Everything he said was like the quote from some great speech. 

"You ever think about where we'll be a hundred years from now?" 

"Dead?" 

"No, not like us personally, just everything. Society." 

Rocco shrugged. 

"Maybe on our way back to destroying the earth again." Rocco narrowed his eyes. Was that Brotherhood of Steel dogma? 

Hancock laughed. 

"You been hanging around those assholes with the power armor too long." 

He could've opened his mouth and said that no, he didn't bother with those guys these days, they treated Hancock like shit and that was a no go, plain and simple. He didn't. He cracked open a beer. 

"They are assholes," he agreed. 

"We'll pull ourselves out of this. They'll be cities again. Factories. Real animals and plants. Give it a few decades. You might not be around for it, but this is the dawn. We can only go upward from here." 

"That won't change anything if people don't change." 

Hancock raised his eyebrows and crushed another mentat. 

"Didn't take you for a misanthrope." 

Rocco looked at him blankly. 

"Someone who hates people." 

He shrugged. 

"I don't know if hate is the right word." 

"I saw you blow a snot rocket at that baseball guy in Diamond City, completely unprovoked." 

"He's a jackass." 

"You went up into the stands and started headbutting people." 

A smile touched Rocco's lips.

He didn't go to Diamond City much these days. Nothing there for him, and Hancock couldn't go in without half the population flipping their lid. He checked up on Nick Valentine every now and then, sometimes Piper. After that kid made him find a bunch of trash in his shitty irradiated water and a guard spotted Hancock, he was pretty much done with the place. Who knew there could be such a huge collection of assholes in such a small space?

"Nothing like a good headbutt. That doesn't mean I hate people." 

"Most people?" 

Rocco considered it for a moment. 

"Nah. Not even most. Half?" 

That got Hancock laughing again. Something about watching him laugh was satisfying. It was something that he'd begun to relate with the unspoken, unstudied feelings. 

"Fair 'nough, Rocco." 

 

The day wore on. Rocco drank more beer. Hancock had moved on from mentats and started getting into the jet and an old bottle of Bourbon he'd pulled out of nowhere. He'd tried to go out to the balcony to "address the people" several times. Rocco bodily prevented that. No one was going to be inspired or anything from seeing their mayor shitfaced and completely spun out on chems, even the people of Goodneighbor. 

"Rocco." 

"Mmm?" 

"You think Shaun is out there?" 

He had to think that. Because if he didn't, then he was just some stuck out of time asshole with nothing to work toward. Sure, being General of the Minutemen was something, so wasn't taking responsibility for all these settlements, but both of those things paled in comparison to getting reunited with Shaun. His flesh and blood. The person he made with his semen. Being a big shot in a nuclear wasteland didn't mean shit. 

"When I find him, I hope he wasn't expecting something better than me." 

He ate a couple mentats to counteract the beer. He didn't notice Hancock looking at him in a weird way until he looked up to put his empty with the others. 

"Geez, I don't know what to do with all this insecurity." Hancock mimed struggling with too many objects. When Rocco didn't even crack a smile, he stopped. "Kids getting his Dad back, what does it matter?" 

"He doesn't even remember me." 

"Yeah?" 

The sour feeling was beginning to seep from his stomach to the rest of his body. 

"He doesn't remember me, and I don't have a lot to win him over." Aside from a bunch of scavenged junk to many one day put in a house. Now, in the shadow of the booze and chems, it seemed pathetic. Rocco put on his sunglasses. 

"Keep wearing sunglasses inside and you'll never win anyone over again." 

He gave Hancock a one finger salute, which was returned in kind. 

It almost seemed like the right time. Just to say something. Maybe, if he was better with words, he could wrap it up into a sly joke that could be taken seriously or brushed off depending. Turn it into something low risk. 

"Can you tell me about your wife?" Hancock's eyes drifted around the room without settling on any one thing. 

"Why?" 

"Curiosity killed the cat, something something brought him back." 

"What?" 

"Nevermind. I'm just curious." 

Rocco rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. 

"She got shot but before that it wasn't working out. If it weren't for Shaun... I don't know. I came back all messed up and it didn't- it just stopped working out." The understatement of the century. 

"Mmm." Hancock's chin was leaning against his chest and his eyes were half lidded. With Rocco sitting on the mattress and Hancock in the wooden chair, there wasn't enough distance between them that the situation didn't somehow feel loaded. Volatile. 

"You ever think about pursuing - hic - anything else?" 

"Not gonna happen." 

"Because you're a misanthrope?" Hancock opened one eye to pose the question. 

"It's not cause I hate people, it's cause people hate me." 

"If you stopped headbutting the elderly and spitting on merchants maybe people wouldn't - hic - hate you." 

It wasn't even six o'clock and they were both three sheets to the wind. 

Even with all the chems and alcohol that his body required, the tremor hadn't left either of his hands. He flattened one out in front of him and watched it shake like a leaf in a small breeze. 

Hancock was looking at him again, this time with his chin off his chest and his eyes both open. 

"Worried?" 

Rocco raked his tongue across his front teeth before nodding. 

"Don't think it's gonna go away." 

"You'll either adapt or you won't." Hancock said it so knowingly that it was almost like a part of one of his speeches. There was real conviction behind the words. "Think I could make it into a bucket off the balcony?" 

"Make what into a bucket?" 

"Pee." 

Rocco took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. 

"I'm gonna fall asleep." 

"Wanna be alone?" Hancock made to rise and leave the room. Ghouls didn't need sleep. Not really. Sometimes if he hit the liquor a little too hard, Hancock would pass out, but his body could never commit to more than an hour and a half or so. 

"I keep thinking about that lady who asked me for Psycho and then died when I gave it to her." Her face was clear in his mind. She always sat in a chair. Her name? Slipped away. "She just fell over and died. People in Sanctuary are mad. She asked for it." 

Hancock shrugged. 

"You ain't a doctor." 

"Good thing." 

Hancock was up and leaving the room. 

"See ya." 

Rocco shut the door and laid down on the dirty mattress. And even though he'd washed, there was still dirt beneath his nails. 

 

His eyes snapped open but he didn't sit up. He was facing the wall, still laying on the mattress in the statehouse. His breathing was heavy. Whatever he'd been dreaming about, it was gone now, only a fog of tension remained. He sat up and rubbed his eyes and looked out of the battered little window. Night again. Moonlight shone in through the boards over the window. He put his hand in the light and watched the shadow copy move along the floorboards. A half finished beer stood beside the bed and he grabbed it and finished it and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Another unopened bottle was near. Before he got into that, he'd have to take a leak. 

Not off the balcony into a bucket. Rocco snorted and shook his head. Typical Hancock shit. 

He opened the door to the little room and drifted downstairs and outside. Without his armor on, without his sunglasses, it was almost like he was naked even though he had pants on. Goodneighbor was quiet. The neighborhood watch members stood on street corners, a few of them dozing. People without houses to go to sat or slept outside. 

Why was he out here again? He walked down an alley and took out Rocco Jr. and started pissing on the wall, careful to not get any backsplash on his bare feet or pants. The drunkenness from earlier had more or less worn off. Still, he could go for another couple beers. Maybe some rum and Nuka Cola. 

Almost it was like he was trying to put off thinking about chems. Like if he made the booze the goal, he wouldn't start getting antsy in a couple hours, and then desperate, in a couple more. Most of what they'd gotten last night was gone, and more still, if Hancock had continued his own personal bender after Rocco had hit the hay. 

He wandered back into the statehouse. Hancock was mounting the stairs and stopped. 

"Well if it isn't sleeping beauty." 

Rocco set his mouth in a thin line. 

Hancock rolled his eyes. "You're so fucking sensitive sometimes, ya know that?" 

He rubbed his chin and sighed. 

"Think we gotta visit Fred before we leave." 

"Where we heading to?" 

Rocco paused. There was so much shit he could get into. Decoding that courser thing, helping out the Railroad, tolerating The Brotherhood of Steel... all of it seemed to swim in front of him, just out of reach. There were so many pieces on the board right now that there was no way he could make the right move without something toppling down or getting lost. Sometimes, out there in the wastes, it was like whatever he was doing didn't relate to his son at all, like it was all busywork or something. He'd forget what the point was of going into building after building and wasting anything that moved. Gobbling chems to keep at it for another couple hours, rinse, repeat. 

"I need to start moving." 

Hancock nodded in that knowing way like he sometimes did. 

 

"Gonna check on Sancuary?" Hancock had waited until they were out of the ruins of Boston before bringing up the small talk. 

"I don't know if I'm welcome." 

"You're the General, who cares if some old broad bit the dust?" 

People shit was lost on Hancock, sometimes. Ideas like mourning and not killing people and shit that was all attached to some morality that didn't really apply here in the wasteland. 

"Hey, Hancock." 

"I'm listening." 

"I saw something once. I watched a dog fall into a pit of pigs and I watched them strip the dog clean. There wasn't anything left for the flies." 

Hancock raised what would've been an eyebrow at him. Rocco didn't continue. There wasn't anything left to the story. Just the picture that always froze right in his mind's eye, the one where the dog finally stopped moving. After so long, the dog stopped moving. Too long. It had endured so much but it didnt make a difference in the end because the pigs ate the bones and then it was like the dog had never even existed in the first place. The guy who the show was for the benefit of had wet himself.

Maybe his eyes had gone empty and far away because next thing he knew Hancock was waving his hand in front of his face. 

He'd seen the life fade from so many different things, now. Not just people. Animals. Synths. Ghouls. How something turned from an awareness into a pile of meat. From a being into an object. 

"Stopped and made this at the chem station." Hancock rooted through his pack and produced a familiar syringe. 

"Psychojet?" 

"Looks like you need it." 

Rocco accepted the syringe and held it in his hand. 

"Just make sure I don't leave anything anywhere." The memory of the abandoned assault rifle was still fresh.

For some reason that made Hancock chuckle and instead of trying to figure out why he put the Psychojet in the brest pocket of his fatigue shirt. 

"What's a pig?" 

"Huh?" Rocco turned to look at Hancock. 

"A pig. What's a pig?" 

For some reason the question sent him reeling. It sent him looking at his current life with new eyes at Hancock in his tri corner hat, at the wastes with the radiation storm in the distance, at the city shrinking behind them. If he didn't shake the line of thought quickly, everything would seem foul and degraded, trashy and impossible, unfixable in the worst way. 

"People used to eat them."

"Before the bombs." 

"Before the bombs," Rocco agreed. 

They continued in silence for a while. Some mole rats crawled out of the woodwork, one of them glowing green. They made quick work of them. Rocco grabbed meat and nuclear material and stuffed it into his pack. 

"Just emptied it out and you're already fillin it with more crap, huh?" Hancock's voice was teasing. 

Rocco grunted and slung his pack over his shoulder.

"Figure out where we're going yet, Rock?" 

"I heard about a Vault where people live. We could check it out, see if they need any help, get some caps and supplies." Rocco shrugged. 

"That's the kind of talk I like. Any idea how far away it is?" 

He looked at the map on his Pip-boy. The rumored location was roughly northwest of Diamond City. 

"Take a look. You'd know better than me." 

Hancock didn't have anything to say to that, but peered into the map. 

"Looks like we're gonna be leggin it for a few. When you wanna take a chem break, let me know." 

"Will do." 

 

It's the dreams that don't quite make sense that stick with him the longest. The ones where maybe everything is almost normal and then he'll see an inhaler of Jet on his kitchen table and everything starts tearing apart at the seems, his lives, the old one and now this one, converging in the ugliest way, Shaun-the-baby crying in a crib and he's looking for something and it's for Shaun and he pulls open the drawer and there's just more Jet, he roots around the red inhalers and something pricks his finger and draws a red bubble of blood from it and he sees the syringe and knows what it is and then it clicks, it clicks that he'd never laid eyes on the chems before while the baby cried and Nora was saying something but he couldn't tune in and

He's in a group shower and he's in the army again, thin and slight like he was when he was a kid before he tacked on all the mass and everyone else is turned away from him and washing and the steam is making all the mirrors fog up but when he swipes the fog away with the towel draped across his waist he sees the scars are there early and looks down in his hand and there's a rusty pipe pistol like the ones he takes off raiders and checks for ammo and throws away after and the fog in the shower starts with the green lightning and dread wells in his stomach because he knows full well there could be something viscous and so quiet hidden in the cloud

The towel is still around his waist and he looks down and his feet are on old cracked concrete in the wasteland and there's sores going up and down his legs, weeping, growing hard and red at the edges and in his hand instead of the pipe pistol there's nothing but a stimpack but it won't help the radiation and too close there's gunfire and it's a second before Rocco realizes that it's gunfire for him and he's still in a towel and something gets thrown over to his right and he drops his towel and dives out of the way and his skin shreds against the concrete and catches on something sharper and he's there looking at the puddle of blood pumping out of his thigh and his hand still has the red orb of blood from the Psycho in the drawer and somewhere the fucking baby is crying

Hancock's hand was gripped hard on his shoulder and he swatted it away and sat up before he even realized what he was doing and for a second there was a flash of hurt across Hancock's face but Rocco was still breathing heavy so neither said anything for a long time. 

They'd been out scouting for fusion cores when they decided to call it a night. 

"That was a bad one." It wasn't a question.

Rocco sat up on the cot. He was looking at the wall in front of him but also not looking at it at all. In the end, his only response was shrugging. 

"I don't wanna pry-" 

"Then don't." 

The memory of the other day was fresh. Sharing any more, this soon after, it'd make him feel raw. Vulnerable. It wasn't like Hancock couldn't be trusted, not really. It was more like it was just another factor that could alter things for the worse. Like talking about that feeling that reared its ugly head or getting too trigger happy. 

"Y'know, not a lot of people would travel with a ghoul." Hancock had his knife out again. He had pressed it into the exposed wood stud in the nearby wall and was spinning it around. TIny pieces of sawdust fell from the hole. 

"S'not the first time you said that to me." The words came out like he was on autopilot. 

"Won't be the last, either. Do me a favor, think about it before you keep shit inside. You think you're tough, but it'll rot you out, Rocco." 

What he wanted to do was look hard into Hancock's black eyes and say that there was nothing to rot out, that there hadn't been in years. More than two hundred, if you added the time he'd spent frozen. Instead all he could manage was leaning over the side of the bed and grabbing his bag and fishing out a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass and taking a shot from the bottle instead. 

Hancock said something that maybe was an under-the-breath type scolding. Rocco didn't catch it. The whiskey burned all the way down. He lit a cigarette. 

"Has it always been every night?" 

Rocco looked up from the ash growing at the end of his smoke. 

"At least answer me that, Rock." 

He swallowed and took another drag. 

"Been for a long while." It had somehow come out quieter than he meant it too.

Hancock nodded, accepting that. 

"Here. Looks like you could use this." He whipped out a box of mentats and tossed it to Rocco, who let it land on his lap. "We gettin out of here or do you need more beauty sleep?" 

Rocco looked at the mentats and then at Hancock. 

"Those fusion cores ain't gonna find themselves." He pressed four out of the little foil blisters and chewed them while he put on his armor. 

 

"They move like fucking dogs sometimes." It was the first thing Rocco had said in a couple hours. The raiders they'd dealt with had been reduced to meat. 

"Dogs're smarter." 

Rocco snorted. Hancock had been wolfing down Mentats while they looked for fusion cores, now he was speeding pretty good and leading the way, shotgun in hand. He stopped when Rocco stopped to look through his pack. Something in his stomach had coiled and started demanding Buffout, which he'd stocked up on. It was just a matter of finding it amongst all the bullshit. 

"Think those vault people are gonna throw a shitfit when I go in there?" 

He'd seized the Buffout and was unscrewing the cap and shaking a few of the capsules into his palm. A few meaning five, and then a tentative sixth. He swallowed them dry. 

"Can't say." 

He'd been traveling with Hancock for so long that he'd begun to lose touch with whatever other people saw when they looked at him. 

"You ain't gonna let me get a cap popped in my ass, right?" 

The wording almost made Rocco laugh. Instead, he just pushed air out of his nose and tossed the Buffout back in his pack and kept walking. 

"Why do you wanna get in there so bad?" 

Because there was some sinking suspicion that his boy wouldn't be alive or intact when he finally found him. Like how small towns give up searching the fields and surrounding areas for a missing person once they've been gone too long. There was the ugly sensation that he didn't need to be worried about what Shaun would think of him because maybe Shaun hadn't been alive for a very, very long time and all he was doing was chasing ghosts, trying to make something out of nothing, trying to cope with tragedy through delusion. And so if he found three fusion cores or fucked around with whoever wanted him to do any running around maybe that would be better than going down a path and learning things that he couldn't unlearn, things that would go right into the pile of unlearnable facts. 

"Might be useful," is what he ended up saying in the end. Hancock must've picked up on something because for once, he didn't push it.


	2. Chapter 2

When he was a kid his Mom took him inside and hit his hand hard with a wooden spoon, enough to make him snatch his hand back and cram his fingers in his mouth for relief. He'd been outside, face tilted toward the sky, mesmerized by how the sun would flash blue and then purple and green like it wasn't actually yellow but maybe every single color rolled into one. It was like, if the sun wasn't even yellow, maybe all bets were off.   
  
The wind blew and the nicks from his razor around his face smarted. Ammo was low. He was dragging a garden-variety sledge hammer behind him. At some point, he'd lost his decent automatic 10mm. Now, he was using some cobbled together raider pistol just to have something to shoot with.   
  
Three (four?) days ago he'd taken all the junk out of his pack and burned it in a pile.   
  
He forgot Hancock was still with him. The ghoul would stay out of sight long enough for Rocco's goldfish memory to stop registering his existence, and then he'd see a little bit of red or some movement out of the corner of his eye and startle and lift the sledge hammer and stop.   
  
It'd happened a few times in the last hour alone.   
  
Something had happened... he furrowed his brow. Something had happened and it'd ended with him and Hancock shouting and getting mad and Rocco had punched the ground and maybe that was what had made him burn all his junk? Or had it happened before? Either way, Hancock was keeping his distance now.   
  
The complicated feeling, it wasn't gonna work, talking about it. Or maybe that's what they'd been talking about before. Could've been a chem argument. Things had been scant lately and those had broken out more and more until finally Hancock had wound up and pegged some Addictol at Rocco.   
  
He'd burned that with the junk too, he was pretty sure.   
  
There was this memory that kept surfacing lately, just showing up in his brain without him wanting it and even if he tried to push it away it played. He'd screw his eyes shut and try and think about those breathing things that Nora said her Dad said the shrink said would help except he could never, ever do it right so it didn't matter.   
  
The memory is always that he's sitting on the couch nursing a gin and tonic with some magazine on his lap that he's not really reading but she doesn't like when he just sits and stares so he has to pretend to do something. Sometime he looks up because even though he doesn't hear her walk over and lean on the wall that goes from the living room into the hallway he can feel her eyes burning into him like they always do these days. Blood rises to his face and he takes another big swallow of his drink and maybe it's time for a refresher.   
  
"Have you even seen your son today?" Her voice has this shrill quality to it now that makes him want to go out into the shed and drink by the dusty bare bulb out there. If he had friends, he might escape to a bar.   
  
The accusation hangs heavy in the air. Rocco doesn't remember what the answer even is. Nora takes it as a negative.   
  
"You sit here," she intakes air and is drawing her hand up to her eyes to rub her temples with her forefinger and thumb, "and you drink, have you thought about getting a new job?"   
  
He opens his mouth to say something but nothing comes out. A new job? When the sound of toast popping up is enough to jolt him standing and ready to fight? With his ruined face?   
  
Instead of saying anything he gets up with his drink and he crosses the room to the liquor cabinet with the nice scotch that he isn't allowed to open because Nora's Dad got it for them as a wedding present and he fishes out the gin and pours it into the glass. There's not much soda water left in there, now.   
  
"You need to start providing." She crosses her arms in that way that was supposed to show that she was the winner.   
  
Shaun is crying and there's the robot taking care of him and Rocco takes a sip of his drink and stands in the living room.   
  
  
He'd stopped walking long enough that Hancock had drifted over to see what the trouble was. Rocco took off his shades and looked at Hancock's black, glassy eyes and even maybe got lost in there because it was just all one reflective void. Like his eyes were small hidey holes.   
  
"How's it going?" There was concern in his voice.   
  
Rocco, anymore, he didn't have any answers. Everything was coming apart at the seams. He couldn't even get his future read by that lady that was dead now from the Psycho that had come straight from his pocket.   
  
He shrugged off his pack and put it on the ground and after a little while Hancock did the same and they just stood in the middle of the wasteland with the sun beating down on them and the loud hum of bloatflies in the distance. After a while, Rocco sat down. Hancock followed, leaning back.   
  
"I don't know if I can jive with this anymore, Rock." By the sound of his voice it didn't seem like he was just coming to that conclusion.   
  
Rocco covered his eyes with the heels of his hands and stayed down in the dark. If he stayed down there long enough it was like he was safe. Hancock reached up and squeezed his shoulder. The touch made something bubble up from inside, his breath hitched in his throat and he swallowed and even though his eyes stung, when he took his hands away from his face there were no tears.   
  
"I see stuff behind my eyes and I don't wanna, Hancock. We have a fire and all I see inside my head is all the tiny fires going out on the street while that lady walks with no shoes on and feet that are all tore up with dirt inside the cuts. She had a dead baby with a big black tongue and she just walked by holding it and looking." He sucked in air through his nose and realized that somewhere along the way he'd started talking way too fast, picking up speed like he was trying to out-talk his regret. He turned to look at Hancock. "I know you think that my eyes are probably as bad as hers but they're not. I'm not holding a dead baby."   
  
It wasn't the first time that the connection had formed. Between the woman with the baby and his search for Shaun.   
  
He'd turned away from Hancock before he'd finished talking and Hancock was looking back at him. Rocco couldn't hold eye contact anymore.   
  
"I don't know if I'd hold it together if you split." He was looking down at his hands. The admission of helplessness was a tough pill to swallow. Did he still have that Jet?  
  
  
Nora stands in the kitchen and her face is beet red and she's saying something about the tab at the grocery store and the payments for the robot and Rocco should call the damn VA if he doesn't think he's gonna be able to hold down a job. And all the while he's just standing there dumbly with the glass clenched in his hand. It's not even eleven and there's whiskey at the bottom of the glass. At the room at the end of the hall, the robot changes Shaun.   
  
"Well? Are you going to say anything?" She folds her arms and internally he flinches.   
  
The neighbors don't even say hello, anymore.   
  
"What do I say?" Without even meaning to he's crossing the living room and going to the liquor cabinet.   
  
"What do you mean what do you say?" Her voice takes that note of shrillness.   
  
It's a trap. He knows it's a trap because she's laid them for him before and he always walked into them but not this time, not now. The scars make it hard to tell that he's furrowing his brow when he takes a sip from his glass and sets it on the coffee table.   
  
Suddenly her face is this mask of rage and she's got a plate from the cabinet and she looks deep into his eyes and lets it shatter on the kitchen floor and the noise alone is enough to wake the baby and the robot is talking to Shaun now trying to get him to sleep and Nora is screaming and it's too much, it's too much, he's thinking about lying in mud or pulling bodies over himself to stay alive or how blood washes away fast in the rain   
  
When he comes back he's on his knees with his palms pressed over his ears and Nora has smashed maybe two or three more plates and she's dealing with the baby now and the robot is out and looking at him and Rocco can only peel his palms off his ears and look back.   
  
What does he say to make it okay? What does he say to his neighbors? Nora? Shaun?   
  
He stares at the robot for too long before he picks up his glass and looks at the brown stain the whiskey has left in the carpet and stands.   
  
"Clean up that mess in the kitchen, willya?"   
  
  
The scene played out in his head as ugly and raw as it was the day it happened. It was like his brain siphoned out all the good things and left the pure shit in high detail relief.   
  
"I gotta..."   
  
Hancock was waiting with baited breath. He squeezed Rocco's shoulder, like he was saying to continue.   
  
"Go to Vault 111."   
  
That seemed to take the ghoul off guard.   
  
"Why would you wanna go there?"   
  
Rocco stood up and looked down at Hancock before he got up too and couldn't make up a good answer because maybe there wasn't one. Hancock had given him a spiel about running away from things but going back to the Vault was more like back tracking. There were the settlements to take care of and the courser thing that Sturges was supposed to build and all sorts of shit he was supposed to take care of and all he wanted to do was peer into the pod and see Nora. And it wasn't even because he hated her or was happy she was dead it was just that her remains had been the first thing he'd seen in his new life and maybe starting all over would make everything make sense again.   
  
He pulled a half bottle of bourbon out of his pack and took a swig and offered it to Hancock who stared at it like maybe he was gonna say no before he shrugged and took some anyway.   
  
"I wanna go there because I have to."   
  
Hancock opened his mouth and then sighed and shut it.   
  
In the distance, a cluster of bloatfies bobbed around each other in the air. Rocco replaced his shades, his hand still fluttering with tremors, and stared at the horizon.   
  
  
There was no moon that night. They shacked up in some old raider camp. There'd been a modest chem stash and three purified bottles of water and that had been enough to put him in a better mood while he tore into the molerat meat. A trickle of blood went in between his   
  
fingers and down the back of his hand and dripped onto his pantleg and the old wood floor and Hancock watched with this drawn and maybe amused face. Rocco chased the molerat with radaway.   
  
"Dontcha worry about cooking your meat?" Definitely amused, then. There was a touch of smile on Hancock's face. Good. There was something about Hancock's smile that Rocco didn't have the words to describe. If there were still cameras and it wasn't a weird thing to ask he'd have Hancock pose for a picture with that same sarcastic sort of smile on his face so he could carry it on his stuff.   
  
"Not anymore." He tore into a can of Cram with his combat knife and ate the greasy almost-meat off the blade.   
  
"You takin first watch or am I?"   
  
"Maybe you. Tired." He had pushed all the Cram to the side of his mouth to say it and continued chewing once he'd finished. There was an inhaler of Jet resting on his thigh. They'd found a couple of duds earlier and Hancock had taught him to check the inhalers out by putting them in a bowl of water. The floaters were empty.   
  
  
When he'd woken up from his deep, cold sleep for the second time, the asshole's bald had been burned into his memory. He half stumbled out of the pod and reached out to where Nora's body was, the blood frozen and crystallized, and for a second his eyes burned with tears.   
  
They didn't come easy, tears. Not while he was awake, anyway.   
  
The skitter of radroach made his blood boil and he half ran around the Vault, vision blurred, looking for more of them to stomp on, the feeling of it, the half-heard sound of exo-skeleton crunching, all of it seemed to make it better. The kid was the furthest thing from his mind because he knew he was alone in the vault and he was no genius but even he could see that those skeletons were very, very old. Like someone had raided a museum and dumped them in there as a prank.   
  
The enormity didn't really set in until the vault opened and he was faced with the hot sting of radiation in the air and the wastes. Everything looked so used up.   
  
He walked down what remained of the road and found a guy in raider leathers, dead as a door nail, for maybe a day or two by the smell of it and Rocco hadn't hesitated to strip out of his vault suit and leave it in a crisp, blue heap on the ground. The hard part was undressing the corpse and he kept seeing it not in the leather armor but in honest-to-god US Army fatigues and something in him had stirred, maybe a survival instinct or maybe something else but he ripped the ring off his finger and hurled it.   
  
That was what he went to bed thinking about every night. He'd gone back there, some nights when he was at Sanctuary and had taken his chems wrong and couldn't sleep, this was before the old lady, Mama Murphy had died because of the Psycho that should've been coursing through his veins, some nights Rocco would go to where he threw the ring and look at the pale brown ground. Hunting, trying to find it, sometimes as flustered and out of sorts as he was exiting the vault, sometimes with the hyper-focus of Mentats behind him, and sometimes, while not even awake at all. Preston had found him then and eased him back into the cul-de-sac and put a hand on his shoulder and asked if he was okay and Rocco brushed it away and took a leak in front of one of the ruined houses and went back to bed.   
  
Bottom line, there were some things you couldn't take back. A black hole could've opened and swallowed the fucking thing for all he knew. Hell, he might've ended up selling it if he hadn't lost it, and what would that do to the memory of his marriage? Fuck it up worse than just getting mixed up and throwing the thing.   
  
He could see Nora's grim disapproval in his mind's eye. She'd cross her arms and look at him with that face that said "I know you came back ass backwards from the war, but this is bullshit, and I'm starting to get tired of it" and maybe not talk to him for a week. That's what would've happened if he'd come home with a story about how his wedding ring was gone because he threw it.  
  
His memories of their marriage were always tinged with Shaun crying in the background.   
  
  
"Okay there?" Hancock was looking at him with those curious, concerned eyes. Like he was trying to predict if this was the day that Rocco started punching himself in the head and wouldn't stop. Or if this would be the day where he pulled out his gun and put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger before a tear even had time to slide down his face.   
  
Rocco, his sunglasses off, his face illuminated by the green glow of his Pip-boy, didn't respond. The shaking was starting to get bad enough that if he didn't focus hard, like two Mentats hard, he couldn't use the damn thing. It'd get a little better if he got some Psycho in him, but that wasn't the kind of chem he could take on a whim. Not here.   
  
"Yeah," he said when he was done. It came out sounding raspy and all together not convincing.   
  
He stepped inside the vault. There was a wave of nausea and inside he was remembering things that didn't make sense. Things that didn't relate.   
  
His Dad sat in the kitchen with a box on the table and Rocco had been ushered in by his mother with an action figure still in his mouth and his father had opened up the box and presented him with some shoes. Rocco had barely ever seen the guy except on weekends and didn't care about shoes and had to go to the bathroom and get back to the television before the commercial break was done so he didn't say anything and tried to leave and his father had risen from his seat and said over his head to his mother: "See, Linda, kid's as dumb as a box of hammers." and then looked down at him with this face like Rocco was a dog shitting on the lawn and   
  
It was his and Nora's first night, before the scars, before the war, and they were tangled in the stale smelling sheets of a motel room. He could feel the warm puffs of her breath as she laughed up against his skin. On the way over she'd looked at him in this way that he wasn't used to being looked at and had touched his arm, less a grab like she was trying to feel how big his muscles were and more like this soft little touch like she wanted to test out how his skin felt against her fingers. Her hair smelled sweet like she used flavored shampoo. In the morning, before he'd even cracked an eye open she'd come back from bagels from the shop down the street.   
  
His hand was cool on the glass and her body looked just like it did all those months before and Rocco stared down at it and put his sunglasses back on. There was something heavy in his stomach. He leaned down and pressed his forehead against the glass.   
  
"Damn. Hey, look, if you wanna get out of here..." Hancock was half turned away.   
  
"Please," his breath caught in his throat and Rocco swallowed and tried again. "Please stay." His voice came out as more than a desperate whisper, but not much more. His forehead was still on the pod. His breath was close enough to create fog.   
  
He stayed there for a long time. Hancock didn't leave. When he was done, he took off his sunglasses and breathed in and started walking out of the vault without another word. Hancock followed.   
  
The sun was setting when they stepped back into the wasteland.   
  
"We need to find somewhere to sleep."   
  
"Sanctuary's a stone's throw, brother."   
  
Rocco pulled a face and Hancock all but rolled his eyes.   
  
"You think they're gonna hang ya because some old broad who wanted chems kicked the bucket? That place is your responsibility, Rocco. You gotta at least go see."   
  
His responsibility. Just like his son was his responsibility, and look how that fucking worked out. As if Rocco could even take care of his own shit let alone the Minutemen's or the Brotherhoods or the Railroad's or anyone else's. As if he wasn't actively destroying himself.   
  
All at once he ripped off his sunglasses and bent at the knee to be able to bore right into Hancock's eyes and for once he let it all out, everything that burned inside his eyes behind his shades and needed to be kept hidden and maybe it was too much, what was going on in there, but Hancock didn't take a step back or try to create any distance.   
  
"You take a fucking look at me, buddy. Look at me real good. I got fucking needle marks all up and down. I've been shooting psycho into a vein right by my dick these past two weeks. I can't shoot straight, fuck, most days I can't even see straight. Can't hear for shit. I got nightmares. I don't give a rat's ass about none of these fuckin people and some days I don't even give a rat's ass about Shaun 'cos he's probably been dead for longer than we fucking know." He breathed in a shaky breath and put his sunglasses back on and took a step back.   
  
"Get it?" His voice was softer now. "I can't do it. I'm not tough. I'm not tough enough to do this. None of you get it. I used up everything inside me to get back home the first time."   
  
Hancock blinked. It was rare for Rocco to string together so many words.   
  
"You don't know, pal, these people look at you and see-"   
  
"I don't give a fuck what they see."   
  
Hancock closed his mouth and furrowed his brow like he was carefully putting together what he was gonna say next. Rocco wasn't even looking at him anymore. His face was pointed to where the last beams of sunlight were dropping below the horizon.   
  
"So that's it then. Fuck Shaun, fuck the Commonwealth. You're too busted up to take care of business, so you're just gonna roll over." Hancock paused. "Roll over and do what? Shoot Psycho till your heart fucking pops or you lose it?" Hancock was looking over at a rock half buried in sour wasteland soil. "Never took you for a quitter, Rocco."   
  
"That's not fucking fair."   
  
"You think any of this is fucking _fair?_ " Hancock laughed. There wasn't any humor in it. "You see all this shit the same as I do. You think kids running around with mouths fulla brown teeth is fair? Everyone on the face of the goddamn planet waking up and eating shit that probably radiates their guts to mush over time? You think any of that is fair?"   
  
Rocco had taken off his sunglasses again and clamped a big hand over both of his eyes.   
  
He wanted to tell Hancock that he plain just wasn't smart enough to do all of this. He couldn't keep all the names or objectives in his head most days and even just talking to people threw a bunch of shit he didn't understand into the mix, every time. There was no way he'd be able to infiltrate anything or find his probably-dead son or even keep all these settlements full of people from dying.   
  
Hancock had drawn closer. Rocco removed his hand and looked down at him and then over at the horizon. The sun was gone. It had left behind a glow of red across the western part of the sky.   
  
Before he even realized what he was doing, the psycho was in his hand.


	3. Chapter 3

"If you're gonna go do shit for them, you gotta clean yourself up a little. C'mon, take some pride in your appearance." Hancock was talking to him over his shoulder, rooting through a chem box while Rocco watched. It was mostly Med-X. Figures, the one time he has the shit on him and doesn't feel like crawling up a wall because he's craving it, they find a full box.   
  
The needles were starting to bother him. Finding the veins. His inner arms were getting to be two big bruises. The backs of his hands were both abscessed. With the dirt caked on, it was hard to tell. Hancock probably hadn't noticed, which was saying something, because that guy picked up on damn near everything.   
  
"What're you saying? I gotta shower?" He crossed his arms.   
  
"What I'm sayin is you don't wanna go in there stinking to high heaven and dirty. One day that doctor's gonna figure you out and spread the word, Rocco. You gotta think about shit like that."   
  
Rocco pulled a face and uncrossed his arms to put on his shades. They were inside. Hancock continued divvying the Med-X into two neat piles and removing the occasional empty syringe.   
  
The Railroad was where they were headed for next. This was just a pit stop to merc some Raiders and pick up some caps, Minutemen bullshit be damned. They hadn't stopped in Sanctuary. They hadn't stopped anywhere. If he took his Mentats right and had enough water, he'd be able to go without sleeping for at least another eighteen hours before shit started to get weird. Any stimulant like Mentats, anything with the capability to keep you awake and moving far past when you should be, with it comes the risk of stimulant psychosis- your brain is up for so long that you start dreaming awake. Paranoia sets in.   
  
The key to keeping the tremors in his hands down to a minimum was Mentats and Buffout. The downside was that his heart was hammering hard inside his chest. Sweat was beading on his forehead and trickling down his face. And god forbid if he took any Psycho in the next six or seven hours. Hancock would have to witness Rocco's blood pressure getting high enough to force his eyeballs out of his head.   
  
"What crawled up that doctor guy's ass and died anyway? He's a prick." He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. There was enough dirt there that it turned to a thin layer of sweat-hand-mud. Rocco grimaced and wiped it on his pantleg.   
  
"Probably knows you're a fucking druggie, Rock."   
  
It wasn't a stretch of the imagination.   
  
"Then why clean myself up? Nothin's gonna change his mind."   
  
"Fine then, I ain't your mother. You do stink, though."   
  
"'Sides," Rocco continued, like Hancock hadn't even said anything, "they already love me after I got that thing for them." The specifics of whatever it was he did for those people were long gone from his mind.   
  
There was no way in hell he was going back to Sanctuary. The way that guy looked at him, Preston, it made his skin crawl. Not because there was anything bad about Preston, but because there wasn't anything bad about him. Like Rocco couldn't even begin to explain or relate to the guy because they were so different. Something about being in his precense made Rocco wanna shrink down, get small and invisible. Every time Preston told him about some settlement that was in need, those eyes big with hope, hell, even when he just said the word Minutemen like it was something holy, it rubbed him the wrong way.   
  
All this responsibility. Hell, he couldn't even listen to the radio anymore because sometimes he caught them talking about him.   
  
"We still don't have any stimpacks."   
  
"Hmm?" Rocco looked up from his Pip-boy.   
  
"I said we still don't have any stimpacks. It's a hike back to Boston."   
  
Rocco shrugged.   
  
"We'll find a trader. We got enough of everything else to put us over."   
  
  
When they got outside, the sun was at the high point in the sky. It was a little after one in the afternoon. Under his armor, sweat was running down Rocco's back and collecting in the waistband of his pants. His fingertips all had their own hard, fast heartbeats. In the distance there was a smattering of houses they'd both come to associate with the Super Mutants that were always around.   
  
"Bet more come because they smell those meat bags," Rocco had said once, out of the blue. Hancock had looked at him with confused eyes until he'd made the connection. Even then, they had been miles and miles away from the broken down houses and in the middle of cleaning out a ghoul infested Super Duper Mart.   
  
"Feel up to dealing with these mutants?" Hancock was shoving shells into his shotgun.   
  
"No choice," Rocco said. It was always right before a fight when the Psycho cravings really reared their heads. He slapped a clip into his (new) assault rifle.   
  
Minutes before they got close to the houses, they'd stopped talking.  
  
He looked through his scope. There were a couple suiciders around. A couple with hunting rifles. One who didn't have anything but the nail board in his hand.   
  
Rocco turned to make eye contact with Hancock. They were crouched behind the beat up shell of a Corvega. Hancock nodded at him, and he took aim and started taking pot shots with his assault rifle.   
  
Hancock sprang from behind the car with his shotgun in hand. The Super Mutant with the nailboard got a buckshot shampoo, and then another from closer range when he didn't stop running toward the ghoul, and then fell face first. The steady beeps from the suiciders were growing closer. Rocco had forward and into the remains of the house adjacent to where the mutants had been hanging out. Three frag grenades were hooked onto his pack. He reached around in a break between the rifle fire (which was mostly missing him anyway) to grab one and lob it over toward where a suicider was circling around to get close to him.   
  
The suicider was over the grenade right as it detonated and its body (minus the bottom portions of both legs) was propelled forward by the blast.   
  
The big green mass was flying at him faster and faster and Rocco took a step back but something beneath his feet gave and his feet sunk into the debris he was standing on and then-   
  
For a second, perfect, white light.   
  
Vision started to fade in.   
  
His head killed. He blinked his eyes. Where was he? His rifle was still in his hand. He rolled onto his back and drew both hands up to his temples to knead them. The light hurt.   
  
Someone was in his face and saying something. The ringing was back full force and he just watched the guy's lips move. Hancock. That was the name for that person. The body of the Super Mutant that had whacked him was still face down less than a foot from where he was. His vision was going in circles, like one eye wasn't quite aligned with the other.   
  
Hancock was snapping his fingers.   
  
"Rocco? Hey, Rocco? You with me, space cadet?"   
  
When Rocco focussed his eyes and looked at Hancock's face, the ghoul broke into a grin.   
  
"Hey, that's what I wanna see. C'mere, get up."   
  
Hancock was so much smaller and lighter. Still, even when he extended a hand for Rocco to grab to get up, his weight was solid.   
  
He was unsteady on his feet. His left foot found the hole in the debris again. He lost his balance and ended up flat on his ass.   
  
"Got your bell rung pretty good, eh?" Hancock looked amused for a moment before his expression changed to one of concern. "Rocco, y'know what day of the week it is?"   
  
Did he ever know what day of the week it was? Who needed week days in the wasteland? Something in his stomach churned and gurgled, and it had nothing to do with the secret Hancock feeling.   
  
"I don't know." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and tried to get up again. This time, he took a few steps down the pile of debris. Behind a fence appeared the body of a suicider, only visible once he moved. Big green fucking bastards.   
  
"You're looking a little green, brother."   
  
Green? He turned toward Hancock.   
  
"Didya just read my mind?" And then his the color started dropping out of his vision again.   
  
When he opened his eyes again his body was still stumbling out of the house. Hancock wasn't in his field of vision so he must've been behind him. The entire world looked so bright and crisp that for a second he thought maybe he was in the middle of mowing his lawn and that he'd go back inside and Nora would be standing there with some kind of sweet drink like lemonade, which she aways watered down too much but he never said anything, and Shaun would be crying in his crib or getting tended to by the robot and maybe he'd have a shower and listen to the radio and take a nap  
  
He'd fallen on his knees and hit his palms against the old asphalt hard enough to draw blood from the heels of them.   
  
Hancock was there now, saying something, touching his shoulder, and for one impossible second Rocco leaned close to the ghoul's neck where his skin was stretched tight over tendons and he inhaled.   
  
  
It was dark out again. He was laying in some brown mattress, still in the Super Mutant cul-de-sac. His head was pounding. Next to the bed, there was a bucket. He peered inside of it. There was enough light cast by the moon that he could see the bottom was empty, dry.   
  
"Was I thrown up or something?" His speech was half slurred, like he'd drank at least four beers.   
  
Wait, who was he talking to?   
  
Rocco sat up and peered around the room. No Hancock.   
  
His Pip-boy was still on his arm. His pack was in the corner of the room, along with most of his armor. He was dressed in a sour white tee shirt and his underwear. Just for curiosity's sake, he lifted his collar, stuck his nose inside his shirt and smelled in the general armpit direction of his torso.   
  
"He was right, I do fuckin reek."   
  
"Toldya so." Hancock's tri corner hat appeared over the edge of the stairs and then there was the rest of him. "You gonna give me a review too?"   
  
Rocco stared back at him blankly.   
  
"A review. Before you decided to go and lose consciousness on me, you were giving me a real huge whiff. I was scared you were gonna hurl down my shirt." He punctuated it with a laugh.   
  
The blank look remained.   
  
"I see your sense of humor hasn't recovered yet." Hancock rummaged in his jacket for something and then produced it. It was only when the needle caught the moonlight that he saw what it was. Some of that Med-X from earlier. His eyes trailed from the syringe back to Hancock's face.   
  
"Jeez, you look like a dog begging for scraps. Here." He tossed the capped syringe over and it landed on Rocco's lap. "Try and eat something before you go and do that though. Your stomach's gotta be empty."   
  
Food was the furthest thing from his mind. His insides felt as sour as his tee shirt. Rocco started shimmying down his boxers to try and find a vein.   
  
"Don't take my advice, then," Hancock said.   
  
Rocco didn't catch it.   
  
  
During the night his puke had aged. By the time they stepped out of the house, the smell had been baking in the sun for hours. Rocco winced, and then tied a bandana around his mouth and nose. He was wearing sunglasses to shield against the brightness of the day. Sometime in the night, he'd almost been on the verge of tears, but couldn't pick one reason of the many for why he would be about to cry. With the Med-X in his system, he didn't want to chance the combination of Mentats and Buffout. Hancock had told him that his heart might get confused and just plain stop. So he'd have to tolerate the tremors. At least for now.   
  
"Where're we going again?"   
  
Hancock sighed.   
  
"We're goin to the Railroad. You're supposed to do more shit for them, I guess."   
  
Rocco recognized this line of conversation. Hancock was feeding him back information that he'd fed Hancock.   
  
"Did I say anything else?" Because fuck if he knew what he was supposed to be doing at the Railroad.   
  
"Nah, nothing important. You called that doctor guy a prick."   
  
Rocco's lips quirked in an almost-smile that was soon gone.   
  
"He is a fucking prick."   
  
Hancock laughed.   
  
  
They both sat crosslegged on the wooden floor of the Statehouse. Hancock had been the one to go out and grab chems and booze this time. The bottle of whiskey between them was half empty, but Rocco was just on the edge of drunk. It was more like a comfortable buzz. Especially with the Jet factored in. The whites of his eyes were red, half chems and half exhaustion. He took another half-hearted shot from the bottle.   
  
"Ever think about blowing this popsicle stand, Rocco?"   
  
Rocco furrowed his brow and looked around. Popsicle stand?   
  
"I think Goodneighbor is fine."   
  
"No, no, not Goodneighbor. The Commonwealth. All this bullshit. Y'know, I heard The Capital has a whole settlement for ghouls."   
  
Rocco frowned. There was a reason he was supposed to be here. What was it again? Lines of worry appeared on his forehead as he reached for something, any shred of information. There was a reason he couldn't just go wherever he wanted to and start a new life somewhere.   
  
"I gotta get the kid," he said finally. The kid, Shaun, who would definitely take one look at him and decide that whoever kidnapped him was better. No matter how any Chinese swords or toy cars he picked up during his travels.   
  
"The kid." Hancock repeated.   
  
Rocco looked up at him and for a second there was bald hopelessness on his face. He caught it and closed it back off before long. What he wanted to say was that he had no idea when he woke up or when the kid woke up and the Kellogg thing had seemed like a decent lead at first but now it's turned into teleportation and a bunch of shit he doesn't understand. He wanted to say that all the settlement business was giving him genuine nightmares and being recognized on the street only made him thinking of squeezing downward into a ditch that smelled like fuel and pulling a body over himself and something dripped down onto his leg and he held his breath hoping that maybe if he could just hold on long enough to it that he'd pass out and have good dreams.   
  
"I don't know," is what he said, instead.   
  
Hancock hummed and rummaged in his jacket for something. Rocco looked up, expectant. Hancock going into his jacket usually meant chems out of his own stash.   
  
Mentats.   
  
Rocco took two, instead of his usual three or four, and chomped down on them and swallowed the shards.   
  
They hadn't made it to the railroad.   
  
"Think I should've done that with-?" He tapped the side of his head. The word concussion kept slipping his tongue. He wasn't back up to his meagre 100%.   
  
Hancock shrugged.   
  
"Probably won't kill ya. I think you got worse stuff to worry about anyway," he nodded toward Rocco.   
  
He swallowed and looked down. What was he nodding toward? Rocco's eyes darted around his person until they fell on his hands and he shifted uncomfortably and sat on them.   
  
"No, not that, you meathead. You gotta pony up the caps to shower before we go deal with this Railroad business."   
  
Rocco sighed and rolled his eyes. With all the chems and food and water and stimpacks to buy it seemed like a waste of caps.   
  
"I'm tellin ya. Before you know it they won't wait till you're outta earshot to start talking shit."   
  
"The guy in the sunglasses wouldn't talk shit." Rocco crossed his arms.   
  
"Look, just cause he wears sunglasses inside doesn't make him the kinda person that won't start up with that stuff soon as ya leave."   
  
"What?"  
  
"Nevermind." Hancock had that affectionate look on his face that meant Rocco had just missed a joke. "Was that your first concussion, pal?"   
  
"Nah," Rocco took another half-hearted swig of the whiskey, "I had worse. In the Army I had one so bad once that it was lights-on, nobody home for a while."   
  
Hancock tilted his head to the side. "Waddya mean?"   
  
  
The snow was packed down and gray from so many feet stomping over it. He'd fallen asleep standing in the power armor enough times that they'd given his set to another tall guy and looked at him with those big eyes of concern. To keep warm, he had a towel tucked into the collar of his shirt. He hadn't taken off his socks in weeks. Sometimes, he could feel something in his feet crack and then bleed, the now stiff cotton of his sock getting soaked again.  
  
This was five days until everything literally blew up in his face and his life became some terrible whirlwind of shit. Five days until he had to tolerate that look from Nora forever. Five days until he had to wonder if he was a good enough father to Shaun. If he would be one.   
  
The Chinese were being pushed back. Soon, they would be in their submarines, beaten, unable to do anything but keep tabs on the land they'd tried to invade. At one point, the idea of victory had put a warm little orb in his stomach. It would always spread to his limbs and make him grin before he could catch himself.   
  
Now, he just wanted to go home. He wanted to see Nora, to feel her laugh up against his skin.   
  
He was on perimeter. That was short hand for leaning against a tree for an entire night wearing a white poncho and waiting for any of the Chinese to come out of the woodwork so he could make a radio call and then shoot them, whichever was supposed to come first.  
  
Some guys had come back to the base with stories about how they'd shot a giant Kodiak bear. Rocco didn't know what Kodiak meant but bear was a word he knew and there was no way in hell he'd be able to kill a bear, hell no.   
  
There was movement in the evergreen trees. The snow that had been balanced atop the needles was gone now, leaving a dark void against the backdrop of snow.   
  
He looked around. His breath was coming out in fast puffs.   
  
One guy was slumped a couple trees behind him. Sleeping.   
  
No one else was in sight.   
  
He swallowed thickly and looked back to the spot where the snow had been on the needles. It could've been the wind. The air was still, now, though. Maybe it had been still the entire time and saying it was wind was just a way of saying that no, nothing was wrong, even though there was definitely the impression of a footprint over there, or was that just his eyes?   
  
In the dark, with the moon's light hidden by the branches, there was no way of telling. All at once he'd turned and started running and there was the crack of gunfire and he fired behind him and didn't hear any noises like anyone got shot and he kept running, sprinting now, trying to get downhill and back to base because he'd forgotten his radio gear in the footlocker at the foot of his bed and now he was really fuck-  
  
His toes were so numb that there was no way he could run down a steep hill and not end up catching anything. The last thing he saw was a big trunk heading right for his face.   
  
  
"...and what happened was I came to and the other guy on perimeter was dead, and I guess I had started a fire in the woods and shit, but I was gone."   
  
Instead of laughing Hancock narrowed his eyes and had another one of those unreadable expressions on his face.

"Got another Mentat?" Rocco's heart thumped hard in his chest.


End file.
